Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction

A hairy biped takes on survival of the fittest.

“One weedy species” will destroy earth as we know it, writes Elizabeth Kolbert in The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
(Henry Holt and Co., 336 pages, $28). As you might guess, we are that
species. Humans, Kolbert warns, have the capacity to actively and
consciously alter the future of the planet by destroying major
ecosystems and annihilating other species. Or not.

Kolbert, a staff writer for The New Yorker,
eloquently compiles more than 500 million years of witty anecdotes,
narratives of historical figures, and her own firsthand accounts into a
concise sci-fi thriller that is, well, true. No matter how resilient the
species, scientists know of mass extinctions that contradict Darwin’s
idea about “survival of the fittest.” That idea, Kolbert argues, is
obsolete: Extinction can be caused by the slightest change in atmosphere
or an asteroid slamming into the earth. “The reason this book is being
written by a hairy biped, rather than a scaly one,” Kolbert writes, “has
more to do with dinosaurian misfortune than with any particular
mammalian virtue.”

Since
the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, humans have managed to
vastly increase the rate of extinction 10,000 times over, some
scientists claim. And that is the difference between the previous five
extinctions, all of which occurred naturally, and the sixth, which, she
argues, is solely our doing. We Homo sapiens act as though we believe we are invincible, Kolbert writes, but we’re putting ourselves at risk of obliteration.

The
book explains to said “hairy bipeds” the importance of shoving an arm
into a Sumatran rhino’s rectum, why rats will conquer what’s left of the
world, and why a bat with white-nose syndrome, probably brought over on
a boat by humans, is like the Bush administration. Streamlining the
complexities of the world and our place in it, Kolbert writes that “to
argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just
cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong,
exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn’t much matter whether
people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the
world.”